


all you leave behind is my broken heart

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bad Ending, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, I Made Myself Cry, Last Man Standing, Morning After, Mourning After, Talking To Dead People, The Author Regrets Everything, Wakes & Funerals, after the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 15:26:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16663402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: This is the funeral.These are the last words.This is goodbye.(And Prompto hates goodbyes more than anything else in Eos.)





	all you leave behind is my broken heart

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this thing a long time ago, when I was still newish in the fandom, when I still thought I could try to do something to save this particular iteration of Prompto in one way or another. I closed the draft document because I couldn't find my way out of the plot or of the grief, and left it alone for a very long time.
> 
> I opened that draft today and -- I'm still crying. So I might as well share it with you. Please don't hate me.
> 
> (I always have to write one fic like this in my fandoms -- the one where the heroes, or almost all of them, die.)

The sun beats heat and light and the slow, slow pain of burning into his arms, into his shoulders, into the back of his head.

He’s already lost track of the distinction between the hurt that lives in his skin from the merciless sun that he hasn’t known for ten years, and the hurt that lives in his skin from the wounds and the broken parts of him from the night that lasted for ten years, and he can still just barely remember how many hours have passed since the sun came back, and there aren’t very many of those hours yet.

He can hear the birds calling in disbelief, far above him where maybe they’re discovering the sky once again and the clear blue spaces of it now that all the ravening evil wings have been swept clean away, and he can see the swoop and the stoop of their shadows, here where his eyes are all but locked to the ground upon which he is laboring. Rocks, soil, the stunted roots of long-dead grass and long-fallen flowers -- the few, that is, that didn’t wither away the moment they were fouled by the reek and the stench of the daemons. He digs past them with nothing but his bare hands, and it’s his blood that waters the soil, it’s his tears that fall onto the stones, and it’s strange that he can still cry, hours and hours and hours later.

He’d been drained and lost and utterly wrecked, last night, and how he’d fought the last waves of monsters and misshapen machines with the tears that had been pouring down his face in the spit and the sputter of that last rainstorm, he still doesn’t know even now. Tears in his eyes that left him dizzy and drained and still able to sight down the barrels of his guns. 

Grief. His hands had been steady, last night, in the first spasm of his grief, and they are steady now, as that grief sends its roots deeply into him, as it claws into him with barbs and hooks.

His hands are steady. Everything else is -- not.

He blinks, and the hole is -- it might be deep enough for what he’s got to bury, now.

What he’s taken for himself because somewhere in the last ten years and change, the last ten years and change in which he had actually been alive, he learned to be selfish.

And grief is the price that he has to pay, now, for his selfishness, the weight that finally makes him stop and fall, where he’d managed to stay steady on his hands and knees just until it all hit him -- just until this particular moment.

It hurts to look up at the sun that is now directly overhead.

It hurts to look down at the rocks and the soil and the long shallow gouge he’s made.

It hurts to swallow. Hurts to breathe. Hurts to be.

Hurts to remain alive when he’s all alone again, without even the comfort of looking over his shoulder to see three short shadows, three sets of shoulders.

Selfishness, to want to keep those shadows, to want to have them walking at his side.

Last night -- 

One of them he’d lost, in the dying moments of last night, and he’d bowed to that one, choking on his goodbyes. His first and last salute to the Chosen King: his left hand over his chest and his head bowed down, though he had never wanted to look away -- propriety had demanded it, and by the time he’d made himself look back up Noctis Lucis Caelum was already turning away, and -- he’d needed to turn his back on the lone man climbing the stairs, too.

The other two -- when in the night had they fallen? When in the night had they gone away from him? But he knows there’s no real or possible answer to those questions when they had all lost each other to the desperate roaring and screeching, the daemons boiling up around them because they didn’t know that their last hour had come, and Gladiolus Amicitia and Ignis Scientia were like beacons as they threw their last and greatest energies into the darkest and worst moments of the night, the last moments of Noctis’s life.

They had flared into bright light -- and together they had blinded him, not for the first time.

Just for the last.

The memory of finding them on the steps, their backs to the rising sun, their bodies broken, their hands entwined. 

He still doesn’t understand the peace that had settled on their faces, the peace of death that had entangled them and tied them irrevocably, together at the end -- together after the end.

He doesn’t even know what peace means anymore, in these daylight hours, with the daemons gone, with the Citadel a far, far speck on the horizon behind him.

Insomnia in his wake, slowly coming back to life, slowly coming back from its silence and its shock.

Insomnia, where maybe they will ring the bells for the ones who are gone -- he remembers hearing them, in the distant memory of schoolboy mornings, but Prompto Argentum has no use for bells, no use for flowers, no use for carved tombs and chiseled tombstones, because those are just -- stones. Stones over that which was now lifeless and burnt-out and gone from him, forever and ever.

He looks at the tattered coats fallen in a heap at his feet and -- he doesn’t see them, he doesn’t, he tells himself he’s alone in this barren place of gray rocks and gray soil, far far away from torn carpets and the blank faces of crumbling and crushed statues, the blank faces of his friends.

Blank faces sunk into their long sleep.

Where he had stood over them and -- 

“Fuck,” he says, and he just, just, doesn’t throw up, not at the hours-old memories:

Noctis pinned into the throne, the sword driven exactly into his heart, the full length of its blade glittering in the sunlight like a nightmare, like a curse, where it was stained rusting-red, where it had taken his life.

He’d almost thought it impossible to pull the sword away, halfway into that high seat and right through Noctis’s body as he’d found it -- but it had yielded so quickly and so easily when he’d grasped it in both hands, when he’d pulled, just one movement and the mortal remains of the King of Light had slumped, at last, freed and fallen rigid into Prompto’s arms.

One last embrace.

First and last kiss, pressed to skin as cold as the stones of the ruined gallery.

He should have thrown the sword away. He should have destroyed it. 

The mad need to smash it to pieces with his own hands.

Instead he’d carried Noctis’s body, and the sword that had taken his life, down the steps, away from the bloody ruin of the throne, down to the lowest dais.

It was the only clear space he could find on such short notice, clear enough and large enough to hold three bodies in repose.

Three bodies: he’d dragged Gladio’s body into the gallery and couldn’t weep, couldn’t weep, concentrated as he was on the sheer monstrous effort he’d needed to get him to his appointed place, the place that had always been his. The Shield of the last King of the Lucii, laid out at that King’s left side.

The tears had come once he’d lifted Ignis into his arms: the lean light weight of his long limbs, the lines in his face gone slack and wrong and extinguished, where he finally came to his rest at Noctis’s right side.

Noctis’s sword at his feet, laid out for all to see the blood on it.

He’s left the bodies behind, empty, sleeping. 

Jackets, here, at his feet.

He wills his hands to stop shaking long enough to fold the jackets neatly.

The material is worn and stretched, and carefully darned in several places. The holes of the years of fighting and wandering, smoothed over and mended: and Ignis had done that work for a long time, until Prompto had been allowed to take the task from him.

He can tell where Ignis’s stitches had stopped and his had begun. 

Nothing to be done for the tear in the jacket that had, until a few hours ago, belonged to Noctis: all he can do is run his hands over the dried blood and the torn threads.

The jackets go in the hole he’s dug in the ground, and the stones he’d unearthed in the digging go on top of the tamped-down soil: a marker, low and small, and maybe in the years to come flowers will grow here, too, and cover what he’s built.

Maybe.

But he doesn’t want to be around to see them.

Mended and torn jackets in his wake, and a cairn of stones to mark where he’s leaving them behind.

He walks.

Somewhere in his sunlit wake, he leaves the cold ashes of a fire, and four chairs arranged around the memory of that fire.

*

He’s grateful for the night, when it finally falls.

A ragged shelter beneath the barren leafless boles of a stunted tree. Water trickling, just a little way past his feet, withered leaves slowly melting back into the soil.

He’s already halfway through the motions of gathering firewood and stacking the little bits and pieces of tinder and dry grass together, before he starts, and looks around at the desolate emptiness of the shrouded landscape, and realizes that there won’t be anyone coming to share the fire’s crackling warmth, the fire’s flickering light.

Only his shadow on the ground for company, and the lonely stars far overhead that glitter coldly, that look down on him.

Leaves and broken branches scattering in a wide arc as he throws them away, and he thumps the back of his head against the trunk of the tree, and pain flashes in his nerves for only a moment, and maybe it jars the words loose in his throat, because he starts talking.

“Hey.”

Sigh of the wind in the branches overhead: not really an answer, not really a voice that he knows, but he goes on.

“It was -- a really pretty day, guys. I had forgotten how many kinds of blue the sky could turn, just with the minutes and the hours going by. I had forgotten that a cloud that gets big enough can cast shadows on the ground. I had forgotten what birdsong sounded like.”

He tries to whistle, but his throat is still too parched and his lips are still cracked and crusted with the salt of his crying to produce any kind of meaningful sound.

“I’ll get better at that, again,” he mutters. “Anyway. Pretty day, but also -- long walk. Long like hours and hours long, you get me? And maybe there’s something wrong with my eyes because every time I look back, I think I can still see Insomnia on the horizon. Don’t look at me like that, it’s a nice place -- you were born there, weren’t you, guys? All of you? -- but I’m not really interested in it right now. It’s -- not a place I want to see right now. I want to be gone from it. I want to forget that it exists.”

He sighs.

In his mind he can almost, almost see the shadows of the others, wavering in the flames, like they’re walking towards him.

“Don’t know where I’m going, don’t know how I’m getting there, if all I’ve got to get there with are my feet. Stupid Prompto, right? Off on a trip all on his own when he doesn’t know shit about -- about anything, really. That’s me: no plans, no ride, no supplies, nowhere to go back to, nothing nothing nothing. All alone in the world.” He tries to bite back a sob. “I -- you guys are terrible, you know that? I hate being alone. I’ve always hated being alone. You actually know why I hate being alone, when it all came out and things went to hell, and then things went even more to hell -- but at least we were all there! At least we were all in hell together! And we were getting out of it somehow -- but, yeah, at the end of it -- you left me alone. I -- why did you guys leave me alone?”

The sobs turn into full-on tears, and that should have been impossible when he’s been crying all this time.

But his words hitch and hitch again and he’s breathless and choking, wet trails on his face, bitter salt on his lips and tongue. “I was -- I was thinking, all the time I was trying to lay you guys out -- I, I really wished I could still do the thing with the -- pulling weapons from out of nowhere. I. Noct? You there? You better be there listening to me even if I can’t see you. You better be listening because I have to apologize. I, I wanted to -- I wanted to break that sword of yours. The blood on it, your blood on it. You never had a hammer to carry around, did you? I could have used a hammer. I wanted to shatter that fucking sword -- I nearly threw up, when I saw it, and you were sitting there calm as anything and _there was a sword in your fucking chest_. Who did that to you? Why did you let them do that to you? How could you have let them do that to you, you looked like you were sleeping, like you were at peace, you didn’t even look like you’d fought back -- you just let them skewer you, just like that.”

He does have to deal with a case of the dry heaves, then, but there’s nothing in his gut to bring up, just the sour taste of bile on his tongue.

“I wanted to take that sword and wreck the throne, and then, then break it. Take a hammer to it and break it into pieces. Obviously I didn’t do that, if you’re here, if you’re there, if you saw what I was doing. I -- I was too busy, I needed to do other things, and -- I couldn’t leave you there, lying all by yourself, if I was bringing you down from the throne I had better bring the others in to be with you, because -- you’re like me, right? You were like me. You’d already had your time being alone. You’d already gotten sick and fucking tired of it. So I -- I couldn’t leave you alone in there. I couldn’t leave you alone with just your sword for company.

“So I, I brought the others in. Gladio, fucker, you’re heavier than all the rocks in the world. Heavier than fucking Astrals. And guess who had to bring you in? Me! Fucking -- how did you get heavier? How did I even manage to lift you? I -- I did. I had to. How many times did you save my fucking life because you were that guy, you were powerful enough and strong enough that literally everyone and everything in the whole fucking world thought twice and thrice and ten million times about messing with you so when I was standing behind you I felt like I was standing behind a fucking wall, and I was safe, and -- then carrying you was like carrying ten thousand walls, fuck.

“And Ignis. Iggy. What the fuck did you do to yourself in those ten years, you weighed nothing when I picked you up, and that’s not just because I had just been lifting fucking Gladio -- I had to make sure I was looking down at your face while I was carrying you, or I would have thought I wasn’t actually carrying anything. You weighed less than I did and you -- you were the one who figured out I used to do -- terrible things to myself. I was bad about eating, I did shitty things to myself about eating and, and not-eating, and I did that and you figured it out and -- I don’t want to think about you starving yourself. But you gave the food you made away to everyone else so they could keep going on. You did, you so did. No more denials. Right?

“Fuck,” he said again, and he lets himself fall, sideways, slumping into the grit of the ground, too close to the weak fire, and he can feel its ashes falling onto his face, and he can’t make himself move.

The grief collapsing onto him, making him collapse.

Buried beneath its weight as he had buried the jackets.

“I -- and now I am about to be that guy. That guy who talks to dead people. That guy who thanks dead people. I never found the chance to really say -- thank you. I did, I tried, and even now when I think of those words -- _thank you_ \-- they sound so fucking small. So fucking inadequate.” 

Far-off moan in the distance: maybe it’s the wind. Maybe it’s some other living thing, mourning.

Prompto laughs, quiet as he can, small as he can. Any louder, and it’ll turn into a howl.

“You know I had almost forgotten what you guys looked like, when the sun was shining on you? Ten years of night, duh, ten years of artificial light, can you blame me? We were all the walking dead then, or if we weren’t the walking dead we were steps away from it, we didn’t want to acknowledge we were halfway to joining the daemons -- one bad night was all it would take and then we would be either daemon food or daemons in the making. 

“Gladio, you just ran and ran and ran and Iris went with you, Cor went with you, Aranea went with you, and -- I, you couldn’t bear to look at any of them, you couldn’t bear to look at any of us, because you knew what you’d done, you knew what you hadn’t been able to do. But, but, every once in a while you laughed when I tried to fuck things up on purpose. Every once in a while you knew what I was doing and you laughed. And that was how I knew you -- you were still around. Even when you weren’t.” 

Rattle of a memory, of the impact of his knuckles against Gladio’s fist, flash of pain and his own nervous laughter.

“Ignis. You didn’t want me around a lot, but I couldn’t take it against you. You -- you had always known your exact place in the world and then -- then you didn’t. But did that stop you? Fuck no. You stayed in one place and you, you tried to get back to that place in the world that you knew, that you needed to be in. I don’t know if you thought it took you too long, you didn’t let me in -- you didn’t let anyone in, except when you said, hey, come over and eat something, I’ve managed it, I’ve made dinner. And those were the only times I saw you smile.”

This memory is a little softer: somehow there’s a small cake on the table, and golden yellow stains on Ignis’s sleeve, and the small cake tastes like a dream of light and of better days.

He almost smiles, too.

But that leaves one more person to talk to, or rather the missing presence of that person, and the smile falls off his face before he can really feel that it’s been there.

He sits up, and he curls into a ball, and misery prickles in his nerves, cold and stale and heavy in his mouth.

“Noct,” he says, very softly. 

The fire crackles and shivers and doesn’t respond.

The wind cries in the branches above him.

He looks up, past the tree, into the night: and even the stars are withdrawing from him, lost in the sudden flurry of scudding clouds on the move.

“How many nights was it, Noct? How many days and nights did we sit up and -- you were sleepy, but you could still carry on a conversation. You wanted to talk to someone, but not just to any person. You wanted to pretend you were a normal guy, with normal problems, and not -- not a Prince. Not Niflheim’s enemy. Not the fucking last of your bloodline. And you’d been surrounded by people who saw nothing but your family and your titles all your life so when you found the idiot who knew literally nothing about you, you latched on to him, like he was a lifeline. You latched on to me and -- I latched on to you, too. I latched on so fucking hard! Because I really didn’t know anything. So what else is new,” and he barked out another half-howl of a laugh. “What is the difference between the me of the past and the me that’s talking to you right now? So many fucking answers. So many fucking differences. I -- I was so clueless and you wanted me to be clueless, so I, I hid all the clues from you and I hid them all from myself. I buried everything in the back of my head and I never looked at those things I was burying, never allowed myself to think about those things, because if I did, because if I faced the truth that I was carrying around and hiding, I -- I’d be different. I’d be someone else. And you’d know I’d turned into someone else, and you’d maybe have turned away. I couldn’t bear that, I couldn’t, fuck.

“Now how am I supposed to know?” he asks, softly. “How am I supposed to find out? You’re gone, Noct. You walked out of the Crystal and you walked out of the night, and you walked to your death and you won, you won the whole fucking war with the darkness, and you didn’t see the sun that you caused to return -- you were dead before it rose, Noct, and you’re gone. Just -- gone. How am I supposed to know what I was really hiding from myself, and from you? How am I supposed to find the truth, when there’s no context and there’s no you?”

The words are like swords, driven into his heart, one by one, piercing him through with each labored breath.

“I -- fuck,” he says. “If I can’t say the words now that you’re not here to hear them, I might as well just give up and -- stop. If I can’t say the words now that I’ve missed every possible chance -- Noct? Noctis? I honestly don’t have any context for things like, like love. What the hell does that even mean? I know it exists, I only saw it in too many faces along the way, I only saw it in Gladio and Ignis and everyone else we met. Maybe I know there’re kinds of it: you looked at Gladio one way, you looked at Ignis another. Luna, Iris, your dad, that portrait of your mom once, the portrait of Luna’s mom. You knew what it was and -- well how was I supposed to know? I didn’t even understand all the ways you looked at me.”

He hangs his head. 

“And half the time I’d catch you smiling at me, and that smile would go away the moment you saw that I could see it, and -- this is what I meant when I said I don’t have the context. Didn’t. I’d wake up and you’d be pretending to sleep so you could, what, be next to me? I’d be hurt or I’d be dumb and you’d smack me on the back of the head and it wouldn’t even hurt, not like I would feel hurt when Ignis was disappointed or Gladio was unhappy. I’d show you pictures and they weren’t even always the good ones, and you’d always find something nice to say about them, even when I told you outright I was just fucking around and I didn’t actually know what I was doing. I -- you do all these things, or you did all these things, and you expect, expected me, to -- what? Follow you to some kind of logical conclusion? Only works when we both know how the logic works, and Noctis, I hate to break it to you, but I didn’t.

“I still don’t know anything, now.” 

He covers his face with both hands.

He’s still speaking.

“All I know is that my heart hurts, Noct, and I think you’re the reason why, but I -- I can’t be mad at you, even though I should be. And you know why I’m mad at you, or you should know: you fucking left me, didn’t you? I can’t be mad. I have literally no right to be mad. You did the thing you needed to do, the thing you were destined to do, and I know you fought it and I know you wanted to live even though you knew you were going to die. You lived, and you were next to me, living, and that’s how I learned to live, too, right next to you -- and now I don’t know what happens. I lost you. I buried you. I had you and didn’t know it. You were with me and you smiled, and I just managed to catch you smiling, and -- now you will never smile at anyone again. Never smile at me again.

“I -- Noctis? Why aren’t you here any more?”

There is no answer that he can make sense of: the wind moans, and the fire whispers, and he’s hoping to hear human voices speaking to him, and he finally falls sideways over, exhaustion reaching for him with ragged claws.

*

They appeared over him, in faint outlines of starlight: slowly, one after the other, hesitant and gentle and wavering.

The broad-shouldered one, hair falling free around his shoulders.

The whipcord one, eyes closed with nothing more than sweet sad sympathy.

The healed one, young once again, and his hand clenched over his heart.

On the ground lay the one they’d all left behind: curled up and shivering, like a ship that had run aground on a treacherous shore of jagged stone, wrecked and lonely and far from home. Dried blood obscuring the freckles of him and the multitude of scars and wounds from ten years of night, from ten years of fighting tooth and nail and bullet and blade for the sake of others. Dried tears obscuring the smile that had always curved up the corners of his mouth -- a smile that he’d worn over and over again, first for others, and a distant second for himself. 

“Shall I go first, then,” said the whipcord one. “Since neither of you seem ready to use your words quite yet.”

“You always had too many of those,” said the broad-shouldered one, quietly, voice shorn of its old hectoring tones.

“And I wish I had more. More than that, I wish I’d had the strength to give them to him.”

So Ignis knelt and placed his hand on the sleeping Prompto’s shoulder. “I don’t have much time, and you won’t know that I was here, or that I was speaking to you: but I have a faint, faint hope that perhaps these words might not be said in vain. That perhaps these words will cross the worlds and the distances, and you’ll know: I didn’t tell you enough and that was my mistake. I didn’t thank you enough. You were the first to bear me across your shoulders. You were the first to take the brunt of my pain and my darkness. You ran forward to help me, even before I could be hurt, even before I could understand that you had a good heart. You were not a fool and you were not a burden: you only didn’t have the knowledge we had, and the only cure was that same knowledge and the time to understand it, and I didn’t grant you those things as often as you needed them.

“So if I could be permitted, if I could leave something behind with you: I leave you my thanks. You were ever willing to face us all, in all our tempests and all our sorrows and all our darkness, and you unknowing of what we were carrying around with us: you didn’t know what we knew, and you still reached out to us anyway, your hands always open to us, even after we had rebuffed you. Or especially after we had done so.”

He pressed a kiss to Prompto’s forehead, and rose, and withdrew.

Gladio sat down next to Prompto’s feet, and shook his head. “What Ignis said: not much time. I’m surprised we got this chance, frankly. I’m surprised, and I’m -- I’m sorry, kid. I didn’t know any better. Should’ve, with Iris and all, and I didn’t. You took everything we all had to dish out and maybe you buckled from time to time, maybe you stumbled, but that’s not as important as the fact that you always got up and you were always grinning at us. You knew what it meant, to always be able to smile. And we didn’t always appreciate it, which makes us -- made us -- idiots.”

“Gladio,” Ignis murmured.

“It’s true,” he said. And: “Ignis says thanks. And so do I. You proved yourself over and over and over again, before we ever left Insomnia. And then you just kept proving yourself, every step of the way, even when we straight-up didn’t want to believe it. Even when bad shit happened to you on a daily basis. You did good, kid. You did good. Should have told you that, too.”

He leaned over, and kissed Prompto’s hand that was still clenched into a fist.

When he stepped away, he drew Ignis to his side. “We’ll leave you to it,” he said, over his shoulder.

“We won’t go far,” Ignis added. “We still have one more thing to do before we must move on, and we will wait on your signal for that.”

The edges of them seemed to soften, seemed to half-vanish into the night.

And that left the third, hale and whole, the ragged wounds and the empty years all scrubbed away.

He stood over Prompto for the space of three long breaths, and then -- he fell to his knees, and tried to gather him close, and his hands never made contact with the shivers, with the trails of tears.

Noctis opened his mouth, and closed it again, and seemed to take a short sharp surprised breath, and then the words came:

“You were almost right, you know. You were almost there. Been a long time since I saw you miss what you were aiming for.” 

He hung his head. 

“I always knew I was going to leave everyone behind, and I was -- resigned to it for such a long time. I couldn’t escape it. It was staring me in the face, it was in everyone else’s eyes. There was only one exception: there was only one person who didn’t see my death whenever he looked at me, whenever I looked at him. And -- and I was selfish. I didn’t want that person to stop looking at me the way he did. I didn’t want you to stop looking at me the way you did. So I couldn’t bring myself to tell you the things that you needed to hear and -- well, here we are,” he said, on a bitter laugh. “You’re there, and we’re here, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I -- they thanked you, Prom, and I can’t make myself say it. Not sure I have the right to. Not even sure I have the right to ask you to keep on living: to keep on going. You -- you deserve to rest, as we do, but you also deserve life, and all the other things that you could still experience, that you could still find. I won’t ask you to live for us, to live in our place: I don’t think we get to say that to you, now or ever.”

“There’s nothing we can say to him, all things being equal.” Ignis’s voice, again, quiet and resigned, over his head.

“Aside from the fact he can’t fucking hear us.” Gladio, on his other side.

“All true. And yet -- I can have faith like you do,” Noctis said. “I can place all my faith in him. He let us down, but -- not in the way everyone else did. Just -- little things. And he never betrayed us.”

“Never betrayed _you_ , you mean,” Ignis said. “That is the truth.”

“So he deserves this. He deserves everything we leave to him,” Noctis said. “He’ll want what we leave or he won’t. That’s not for us to decide. But to give it to him, yeah, we can do that. He at least gets that choice and he can make it or break it or ignore it or, or -- ”

He couldn’t bring himself to speak the last possibility aloud.

“He’s going to hate us for a long time,” Gladio muttered.

“We would only deserve it,” Ignis sighed. 

“Not you,” Noctis said. “He’d get over the two of you quickly. Me, well, that’s an entire another story. You heard him.”

“So get on with it,” Gladio said.

“Yeah,” Noctis said, and he held out his hands over Prompto’s form, the only real thing he could see. “Yeah.”

Gladio on his left and Ignis on his right, and he drew from them, and from himself, the last of their strength, the last of their power.

The weight of two familiar guns in steady hands -- and one more thing, one more possibility.

Noctis gathered all that was left, blue shards of unsteady power, blue shards glittering, and laid his hands on Prompto’s head. 

He knew that Prompto had kissed him on the forehead, in the rubble of the throne room.

And so he kissed him, ghostly brush of mouth against mouth. 

Whispered, “If I had known what love was, I would have given mine to you. But -- that is gone from us now, from you and me. All I can do is leave you with what I believed in. All I can do is leave you with the last truth I knew, the last truth I learned. If you can, if you can still go on, if you choose to go on, then please do this for me: carry that love with you, in you, wherever you go from here.”

“Wherever you go from here,” Ignis echoed.

“Wherever you go from here,” Gladio echoed.

“Prompto,” Noctis said.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to cry or scream at me for writing this -- I'm on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).
> 
> This isn't my swan song, either, just wanted to let you know I'm gonna be around for quite a while yet!


End file.
